When the Obama Presidential Center opens next month, and its funders are honored and congratulated, there are two major financial contributors worthy of a bow or two: Chicago and Illinois taxpayers.
The Chicago Department of Transportation said it has spent $123.3 million since 2022 on capital projects aimed at remaking the roadways and green space in Jackson Park and around the center.
And there’s still more work to be done. The final public infrastructure costs are likely to approach $200 million.
The costs are not part of the presidential center’s privately-funded $850 million price tag.
“The Chicago Department of Transportation has delivered a series of roadway and mobility improvements in and around Jackson Park in coordination with the Obama Presidential Center,” CDOT said in a statement to the Sun-Times.
One major change included ripping up a half-mile of Cornell Drive between Midway Plaisance and Hayes Drive. The center’s landscape architect, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, turned what was an obtrusive six-lane highway ripping through Jackson Park into walkable green space that links the Obama campus to the park’s historic lagoon to the east.
Other projects included adding a third southbound lane on DuSable Lake Shore Drive between 57th and Hayes drives; reworking Hayes Drive east of Stony Island Avenue that involved reconfiguring intersections at Cornell, Richards and DuSable Lake Shore drives; and adding a pump station to help fix flooding at the 59th Street pedestrian underpass.
CDOT also built three pedestrian underpasses in the park. The department widened a three-block stretch of Stony Island Avenue that runs by the Obama Center and gave the thoroughfare a tree-lined median.
The funding comes from a $174 million pot created for the center’s benefit by the state back in 2018.
“Bringing the Obama Presidential Center to Chicago took leadership and vision, and we are gratified that our partners in Springfield also saw the potential for what this means for all of Illinois,” then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement at the time.
CDOT said it’s planning additional work in Jackson Park south of 64th Street, including building a pedestrian underpass at Jeffery Boulevard and South Shore Drive. This will cost millions more, but the agency doesn’t yet have the funding.
Brenda Nelms, co-founder of Jackson Park Watch, a nonprofit that has opposed constructing the Obama Center in Frederick Law Olmsted-designed greensward, said the widened and reconfigured roads risks “slicing and dicing” the park.
“There had long been problems about it being a coherent park [as the roadways previously existed], and it’s completely true now,” she said. “It’s really cut horizontally where it had been more vertically.”
Not included in the $123.3 million expenditure is a new half-acre park just west of the presidential center on Midway Plaisance, between Stony Island and the Metra Electric District tracks. The Obama Foundation covered the $4.4 million cost of the green space.
“It’s really one of our first universally accessible playgrounds where we’re putting in play equipment and design elements that are for different types of physical [abilities],” Chicago Park District Director of Planning and Development Heather Gleason said.
A Chicago Public Library branch has been built inside the Obama Center, but the facility’s construction was funded by a $5 million MacArthur Foundation grant, not taxpayers.
“We are thrilled that the Obama Foundation’s $850 million investment in the South Side is sparking needed infrastructure improvements for the community,” the president’s foundation said in a statement.
The center opens June 19.